This story first appeared at UCSB's The Current .
What do you do when you’re overseas and you find out that your home country has been invaded? That was the unfathomable question UC Santa Barbara postdoctoral researcher Mariya Romanova was faced with last February when she learned that Russian forces had crossed the border into Ukraine.
“I was shocked,” said Romanova, who works in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry and at the Quantum Foundry. Her hometown, Kharkiv, near Ukraine’s northeastern border with Russia, was among the first to be attacked, with Russian troops firing long-range artillery into the city.